Your Personal SWOT

Identifying your needs and values is fundamental in providing direction to your life. To truly capitalize on opportunities, it's essential to objectively assess your strengths and weaknesses. This self-awareness is key to success in both personal and professional endeavors.

The SWOT analysis is a method commonly used in business. It focuses on the analysis of a business/organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The assessment provides valuable input for decision-making and strategic development plans. The model captures internal and external factors of the business and divides them into positive and negative aspects. Internal factors are the strengths and weaknesses—things with a high chance of internal control. External variables are the opportunities and threats. Since these are outside of the organization, they cannot be controlled. However, even if there is no direct control, it doesn’t mean they should be ignored; these factors may still be addressed, mitigated, or maximized.

In the same way that organizations have strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, we as individuals also have our SWOT. Even if the answers look very different from a corporate SWOT, the main goal is the same: to create awareness of important factors that impact our decision-making or personal strategy.

A personal SWOT is a self-evaluation tool that facilitates an assessment when it comes to career growth, self-development, and management of change. It helps you get a picture of your current situation in a simple visual way. The value of the exercise is in the actions that follow the analysis.

Let’s look at the different factors:

Strengths

Strengths are the internal positive aspects that you can control. In business, for example, the “S” quadrant tries to answer questions like “What are your competitive advantages?” or “What resources are available?” In your personal life, this could be your skills, education, and experience.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses are internal negative attributes that can sometimes overshadow its strengths. For example, the “W” quadrant tries to answer the question “Where can we improve”. Also, there might be things you’re not comfortable with but that you have some level of control over.

Opportunities

Opportunities are positive factors that can benefit or potentially help the success of a business. The “O” quadrant attempts to answer questions like “In what segments can we try to increase sales or market share?” In personal life, opportunities could be a new job market trend you can take advantage of or new business prospects.

There are many opportunities out there; you have to pursue them, sometimes unceasingly. Opportunities are often time-sensitive, which makes the decision-making process more challenging. A lot of times, when an opportunity arrives, fear automatically arrives too. We want the perfect opportunity at the right time, and that is very rare. Choices are usually risky, which is why it’s important to decide based on the information you have at that moment.

Threats

Threats are the negative external variables that you have no control over and that can screw up your plans. Even if you don’t have direct control, though, there are actions you can take to navigate, avoid, or minimize threats. In business, the “T” quadrant tries to answer questions like “What environmental factors are threatening the company or the product?” Identifying your personal threats is important too because it creates awareness about your vulnerabilities. For example, being aware of job market trends and your personal position toward them could help you identify options to reduce individual risk in an adverse turn.

Threats are aspects we cannot change but that we can address. We can navigate the threats and be clear about whether we must make a decision.

The weaknesses and threats should not be seen as totally negative aspects. They’re just part of the imperfect world in which we live and help us to identify our vulnerabilities.

The SWOT is a tool for self-evaluation. It’s not a perfect recipe and it will not tell you what to do. It just facilitates a way to make organized and clear decisions. It requires time to implement a clear idea and honesty to identify weaknesses and threats. Sometimes, it can be useful to have feedback from mentors and others close to you. Always keep in mind that this is your exercise and not others. It is preferable to keep it simple and have a clear understanding of why you are doing a personal SWOT. This is a tool to facilitate decision-making through organized ideas. We should see the SWOT from an actionable standpoint. This must also be a dynamic process. Your SWOT today might be different from your SWOT ten years ago, and that’s good because it means you are moving on in your life and career.

Skills development and learning new things is a never-ending exercise. We should be constantly looking at how we can develop and maximize opportunities, manage weaknesses, and address threats. It is important to keep in mind that there is no right or wrong answer for this exercise. The answers are not absolute, and there are chances to change or address them. And at the basis of this exercise is the objective to simplify your life, so keep the answers as simple as possible.